Bitcoin Company Offers Stock Denominated in Bitcoin

By Christopher Mims

February 7, 2014

Startup Bitcoin Kinetics, which aims to create hardware that can allow vending machines to accept bitcoin, is offering 10 billion shares of common stock on the website Cryptostocks. This isn’t your typical IPO—Cryptostocks, where Bitcoin Kinetics will be “listed,” describes itself as both a crowd funding platform and a place to “buy shares… and earn dividends.” It’s not clear what the legal status of Cryptostocks is, since it’s not licensed or registered as an exchange. One commenter called Cryptostocks “another of the play-pretend Bitcoin financial exchanges.” (We reached out to Cryptostocks for comment, and will update this when we hear back from them.)

So why should we care about an untested prototype produced by a company launching on an unregulated “exchange”? One reason is that the bitcoin ecosystem, while for the most part not so great at creating viable businesses, is awfully good at prototyping things that might someday exist once they’ve been produced by parties with enough resources to get them through the inevitable regulatory hurdles.

“Eventually Bitcoin Kinetics will become a Decentralized Autonomous Organization run completely by smart contracts, 3D printers & shipping centers, making it run on its own.’”

Got that? Corporations of the future are comprised of contracts executed in code and own factories full of 3D printers, from which robots ship goods. Profits are re-ingested by the software supervising the whole operation, and no one has a job anymore.